BlogJam: Trying to avoid the fray

Blogs at: Reason magazine’s blog, Hit & Run, as well as The Agitator. This reporter was briefly a guest blogger at The Agitator, where, after two posts, he realized that he was out of original ideas and stopped blogging altogether. “My problem is I usually have too much in the queue,” Balko says unsympathetically. Under the name: Radley Balko

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Hometown: Greenfield, Ind. He’s been in Washington since 2001.

Age: 32, born April 19, 1975

Day job: Reason magazine editor. He says blogging helped him get his past job as a policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute and probably helped with Reason, though he has a reporting background, as well.

Started blogging: February 2002

Political leaning: “Left-leaning libertarian, if you pushed me,” he says, citing John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle in action. People should be able to live their lives as they please as long as they don’t harm anybody else.”

Killer post: Balko cited his first post on Cory Maye, in December 2005 (which Megan McArdle also referenced when talking about Balko). He was researching flawed drug raids when he came across the Mississippi case.

Maye’s home was raided by a SWAT team that had the wrong address, and Maye shot an officer — the son of the local sheriff — in what he said was self-defense, unaware that the black-clad raiding party had what they thought was legal authority.

He was sentenced to death. After Balko brought attention to the case, the death sentence was overturned on appeal. ( Maye remains in prison, however, and his case has attracted very little mainstream media attention.)

Biggest blunder: “I’ve given in to the temptation to get into these petty shouting matches that tend to be over minutiae that no one cares about and makes everyone look small and doesn’t contribute to anything,” he says.

The L.A. prosecutor has goaded him several times, and Balko says it’s been a mistake to respond every time other than on the Johnson case.

Biggest dust-up: Balko says he has had frequent spats with a Los Angeles County prosecutor who blogs at Patterico’s Pontifications. The biggest, he says, came when the prosecutor accused Balko of jumping to conclusions about the death of 92-year-old Katherine Johnson, who was shot and killed during a police raid.

“The reason why I speculated early on is because I had studied so many of those botched raids and it all seemed familiar,” Balko says. “I’m happy to say my conclusions were correct and his were incorrect, and I’ll leave it at that.”

Blog philosophy: Balko says he has two answers. “They’re just sort of an almost infinite expansion of the newsstand. I don’t buy into this idea that you can categorize blogs together as good or bad or an alternative to traditional media. It’s just an extension, another medium,” he says. The second part of his philosophy stems from the fact that he has come to “loathe politics.”

He doesn’t like how “high-profile blogs neatly align themselves with one party or the other [and] devolve into a resuscitation of campaign talking points.”

“I’ve tried to use my blog to generate stories and coverage of issues,” he says. And it’s worked. Research he did for his blog led to a recent cover story for Reason and a Wall Street Journal op-ed skeptical of the work of a prolific Mississippi medical examiner who has regularly testified in capital cases.

The doctor says he performs around 1,500 autopsies a year. Experts say no examiner should do more than 250 per year. One case in which his testimony was crucial: Mississippi v. Cory Maye.